The Top 10 Clarion Calls of 2007!
From politically-indoctrinating professors to innovative educational programs, 2007 had it all.
Americans Want to Help Immigrants, Up to a Point
In 1982, the Supreme Court decided that K-12 education could not be denied to illegal immigrants. Symbolically speaking, these children have now grown up and, twenty-five years later, the issue is whether illegal immigrants should be denied a college education at public community colleges and universities.
My view is that individuals who live in the United States, even though illegally, should be allowed to attend college if they pay the full cost of their education.
Illegal immigration is an emotionally wrenching issue because most Americans believe two things that currently contradict one another. They believe that our laws should be obeyed. Yet they recognize that today’s tight immigration laws fly in the face of a major reality: millions of people live in nearby countries whose governments have ruined their economies, making their citizens desperate to leave.
Harry Potter Goes to College
Editor’s note: The latest installment in the wizarding movies, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will likely make an appearance under many Christmas trees this year. A more important question is whether the books should make an appearance in college courses. This article was originally published in the Charlotte Observer on August 9, 2007.
Universities across the country are adding Harry Potter to the curriculum in disciplines as diverse as English, philosophy, history, Latin, and science. Edmund M. Kern, an associate professor of history at Lawrence University and author of the reader’s guide The Wisdom of Harry Potter, is teaching an entire course on Harry Potter this fall.
The generation of students entering college this year has a mania for J. K. Rowling’s seven-book series about a young boy’s adventures in a fantastic magical world. Harry Potter’s ongoing battle against evil, with its themes of choice and consequences, life and death, and love and hate, reverberates among this generation as Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five captured the students of the 1960s.
But are Harry Potter books good enough for the college curriculum?
All Rights, But No Freedom
Mock constitutional convention at UNC-Chapel Hill produces a document inspired by radical politics.
Accountability – What Is It?
“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.
You can send your son to college, but you can’t make him think.”
This little ditty ran through my mind as I was trying to understand the accountability movement of colleges and universities. Under pressure from the federal government, higher education institutions are scrambling to find ways to measure and report “learning outcomes” – that is, to show that students learn something after four years at their institution. This week, at a Washington, D.C., meeting of a Department of Education accreditation advisory group, that pressure will increase.
Fifty years ago, the student was accountable for learning, not the college.
In Defense of a Dutiful Trustee
On November 26, The Dartmouth published a column called In Violation of a Trustee’s Duty, by Bill Montgomery of the Dartmouth Class of 1952. The article called for Todd Zywicki’s punishment or forced resignation as a member of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees because of remarks made by Zywicki while speaking at the 2007 Pope Center Conference.
Since we at the Pope Center are not privy to all of the insider information at Dartmouth, we cannot comment about all of the charges against Zywicki by Mr. Montgomery. However, we expect that the charges we know nothing about are no more substantial than the charges for which we do have knowledge, and those are completely without merit.
The High Cost of Low Tuition
The Florida legislature voted this spring to allow three universities to raise tuition well above the average for Florida’s state universities – up to 40 percent over four years for the University of Florida and Florida State, up to 30 per cent in the case of the University of South Florida. Although Governor Charles Crist had threatened a veto, he changed his mind, and tuition is going up in the fall of 2008.
When it comes to setting tuition, who is right – the legislators, following the lead of university administrators, who want significant increases in tuition — or the governor, who signed the bill reluctantly and vetoed a system-wide 5 per cent increase in tuition this fall? (Editor’s note: The legislature eventually overrode the governor’s veto.)
Campus Safety vs. Civil Liberties
The slaughter of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech by a disturbed gunman on April 16, 2007 had an impact on the American campus similar to the impact the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks had on the entire nation. It became more than a loss of lives; it was a reminder that danger can strike at any time, and a warning shot urging a new vigilance. In the immediate aftermath, universities across the country rushed to tighten up their emergency procedures and to increase safety precautions.
Within two days of the shooting, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper initiated the formation of a task force to study the emergency readiness of local colleges. Shortly after, UNC President Erskine Bowles convened The Campus Safety Task Force to specifically scrutinize the UNC system’s preparedness. The Task Force’s final report was introduced six months later at the November Board of Governors meeting by Leslie Winner, UNC system vice president and General Counsel who chaired the commission. The Board of Governors passed the task force’s proposals resoundingly.
What “Helicopter Parents” Should Really Want
“Helicopter parents” are in the news again. These are parents of college students who don’t let go—they “hover” over their children, staying in constant electronic communication. When a problem arises, they drop down and help the students get out of a fix. At the extreme, this behavior annoys university officials, and some administrators fear that these parents are keeping their children from growing up.
Helicopter parents got a bit of a boost recently, however, from a surprising direction—a new effort by colleges to be accountable. A national survey discovered that students whose parents took an active role in their school life were more “satisfied with every aspect of their college experience,” George Kuh, director of the survey, told the Washington Post (Nov. 5).
Speaking Freely At Fayetteville State
Freedom of speech has returned to Fayetteville State University, thanks to school officials’ decision to drop an explicitly unconstitutional speech code. This change represents a victory for liberty, for students, and for the advocates of true liberalism on college campuses, which include the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
In January 2006, the Pope Center and FIRE worked together to produce “The State of the First Amendment in the University of North Carolina System”, which looked at individual UNC policies in light of their constitutionality – and found several lacking. Among them was Fayetteville State’s Code of Student Conduct’s definition of proscribed “racial harassment”: